“Nimona” author/illustrator and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power showrunner Noelle Stevenson is releasing a new graphic memoir in January. Titled “The Fire Never Goes Out,” the graphic novel will collect nearly eight years of Stevenson’s personal comics, some of which have never before been published.
“Over the last about seven or eight years, I’ve been drawing comics just as they come to me,” Stevenson said in an io9 interview announcing the book. “About things in my life, my feelings. For me, they’re just ways of exploring my own feelings and my own sense of self. I really just did them for me. But over those years, I’ve really created a lot of these personal comics, and it’s become a tradition every year that I would combine them together into a little retrospective … I had seven or eight years of these, and my amazing editor at HarperCollins last year reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in publishing these as a collected comic memoir.”
The comics include pieces that Stevenson has published previously via Tumblr and her other social media accounts, as well as other stories and illustrations that she’s never shared before. Combined, they create a portrait of her life, art, and personal growth over the last eight years.
“All of these are sort of drawn in the moment, from the time I was 19 years old,” said Stevenson. “I had always struggled with telling people or showing people how I really felt. Something was getting lost in communication. I was trying to reach out to other people and establish connections. The comics gave me a language to do that that I hadn’t had before.”
If you’re interested in learning about Stevenson’s personal story, you’ll be able to find the “The Fire Never Goes Out” in bookstores everywhere on January 7, 2020. If you want to hear more about “The Fire Never Goes Out” and Stevenson’s She-Ra work, be sure to head over to io9 for their full interview and announcement.
